How to Use in-joke in a Sentence

in-joke

noun

• And the trust the couple set up with the name Olfert could have been a private in-joke.
  — Adriane Quinlan, Curbed, 13 Sep. 2023
• The album is paced to flow like an old-school LP, with 12 songs in 42 minutes, splicing straight-for-the-jugular songs with detours and in-jokes.
  — Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, 27 Mar. 2023
• The film is peppered with dry wit rather than laugh-out-loud moments, and non-Norwegians might miss some of the cultural in-jokes.
  — Ars Technica, 31 Oct. 2024
• This is the show, after all, that worked in a reference to an extremely nerdy Star Wars in-joke about an ice cream maker.
  — Katie Rife, Chron, 2 Mar. 2023
• However, for those in the know, the in-jokes and references are a delightful surprise in this ode to the classic studio era.
  — Tim Moffatt, EW.com, 26 Jan. 2024
• But then again, nobody ever expected Lou Barlow and John Davis, the duo with the indie rock in-joke nickname, to be anything more than the sum of their parts.
  — Joe Gross, SPIN, 28 June 2024
• The app’s user base skews young, and the content brims with references, memes and in-jokes the uninitiated won’t understand.
  — Tatum Hunter, Washington Post, 16 Feb. 2023
• As an art-house in-joke, the title of Williams’ new sort-of-documentary, sort-of-funhouse-mirror-maze skips straight to threequel status.
  — J. Kim Murphy, Variety, 22 Sep. 2023
• The title of the first full-length boygenius album, like many aspects of the band’s fledgling lore, is a playful little in-joke that functions as both a wink and a provocation.
  — Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2023
• Or the in-joke nod to Beetlejuice, a comparative reference which does this movie zero favors.
  — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 26 July 2023
• This film, with its bevy of cameos and in-jokes specific to the French arthouse scene, is unlikely to break the pattern, but the Fillières faithful will hold it especially dear.
  — Guy Lodge, Variety, 16 May 2024
• Scrubs one episode at a time, offering memories, behind-the-scenes trivia, and heartwarming in-jokes.
  — Josh Sargent, Men's Health, 14 Mar. 2023
• These worlds are full of specialized languages, secret social codes, and networks of references and in-jokes that would take weeks of immersive study to grasp.
  — Phillip MacIak, WIRED, 7 Mar. 2023
• On June 2, a Daily Mail article introduced this internet in-joke to the masses.
  — Leah Dolan, CNN, 14 June 2024
• Throughout the 2-hour runtime, the crowd reacted raucously to all the major moments, but especially the Easter eggs and in-jokes.
  — Angelique Jackson, Variety, 26 July 2024
• The loneliest feeling in the world must be somebody stumbling into The First Shadow as a total neophyte and wondering why everything seems to be an in-joke.
  — Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 21 Dec. 2023
• By the 1970s, however, the mathematical and social thrill of Bourbaki’s in-joke was showing signs of waning.
  — Michael Barany, JSTOR Daily, 24 Mar. 2021
• Yes, there are in-jokes and references to how this timeline differs from ours, along with Easter eggs, some cat’s-out-the-bag cameos courtesy of a crisis on infinite earths, and a few secrets that are best kept as secrets.
  — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 6 June 2023
• These are worthy questions that Honoré asks but never really answers, opting instead for in-jokes, homages, cameos and a flighty narrative that fails to sustain his film’s high-concept premise.
  — Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2019
• But this is really about the rush of watching Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt making goo-goo eyes at each other in between the occasional explosions, high-pursuit car chases, shoot-outs and industry in-jokes.
  — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 13 Mar. 2024
• So perhaps one way to honor Granger is to reclaim the avocado toast meme as an in-joke that nonmillionaires and nonbillionaires of all generations can relate to.
  — Aarushi Bhandari, The Conversation, 17 Jan. 2024
• Weil, for his part, was playing a prank, propagating an elaborate in-joke that continued among mathematicians for decades.
  — Michael Barany, JSTOR Daily, 24 Mar. 2021
• Advertisement The formula was also juiced by a few new water-cooler ingredients, including an in-joke in which Smith is slapped by Lawrence, clearly a reference to the Oscars .
  — Greg Braxton, Los Angeles Times, 10 June 2024
• Fewer still will have the PhD-level familiarity with his filmography to appreciate all the in-jokes to his oeuvre, which builds to a feel-good reunion of actors from the real-life Moretti’s previous movies.
  — Peter Debruge, Variety, 24 May 2023
• This is because Base’s near-instant transactions and extremely low fees make trading these assets – which have evolved from in-jokes to become crucial entry points to the world of Web3 – more attractive than on virtually any other network.
  — Sandy Carter, Forbes, 8 Oct. 2024
• That provides a winking in-joke for domestic audiences in his casting here as another shrink, Celeste, the title character’s despondent father, who generally has his head too deep in books to look at life.
  — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 7 Sep. 2023
• Those cinematic in-jokes geared for older viewers are a prime example of Kaufman’s consistently amusing screenplay.
  — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter, 29 Jan. 2024
• Situating their work somewhere between neo-Dada and Pop Art’s poke at the high-art citadel, Arneson and his colleagues shamelessly embraced amateurish craftsmanship, in-jokes, put-ons and quirky narratives.
  — Patricia Failing, ARTnews.com, 29 July 2024
• Their announcement implicitly welcomes autistic audience members, too, noting that there are resources available should anyone feel overwhelmed by the spectacle, and including a few in-jokes.
  — Vulture, 10 Dec. 2023
• Some of the film’s winking references are more esoteric than others, and a lot of wordplay and in-jokes are potentially lost on a non-Japanese audience: some of them are, according to the subtitles on my copy, basically untranslatable.
  — Kambole Campbell, IndieWire, 15 Aug. 2024

Last Updated: 12 Mar 2025